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As the 71-year-old woman undressed in an LA Fitness locker room, she had no idea she was being photographed. The photographer — Playboy model Dani Mathers, in the foreground of the shot, feigning shock in the selfie — posted the image on social media in 2016 with the following catty comment:

The Twitterverse loved Kelly Clarkson's trouncing of a troll that called her fat. (Chris Pizzello / Invision/AP)

“If I can’t unsee this you can’t either.”

Well.

Turns out few found Mathers’s public ridicule of another woman’s body as hilarious as she did.

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For starters, LA Fitness revoked her membership and banned her from all of their gym locations. Playboy suspended her. A local Los Angeles radio station fired her from a recurring spot she had on air.

Police investigated. Charges were laid. And the case is still not over, even though in May of this year, Mathers — now 30 — pleaded no contest to misdemeanour invasion of privacy. That came with three years’ probation and community service to clean graffiti in lieu of jail time.

Social media scorched Mathers as being a vain jerk for posting the photo on Snapchat for all to see. (The woman in the photograph never consented to being publicly identified after police tracked her down for their investigation.)

Though body shaming is not new, Mathers’s creepy stunt arguably amplified the backlash to it across social media. This year, celebrities like singers Kelly Clarkson and Rihanna — both picked on publicly — led crowd pushbacks and ignited body-shaming discussions.

Just two months after Mathers’ conviction, Clarkson tweeted out a July 4 tribute to U.S. military members. A Twitter user criticized the singer’s weight.

This year, Rihanna was one of the celebrities who led pushbacks and ignited body-shaming discussions. (Eduardo Parra / Getty Images file photo)

In another low, a male blogger for Barstool Sports tried to make the case that Rihanna was overweight. The post by Chris Spagnuolo was deleted after an angry torrent of reader blowback. (The blogger later whined he was being cyberbullied.)

This past summer, vocalists in the Sheraton Cadwell Orchestra received a fat-shaming email from management directing those “not physically fit and slim” to stop wearing “tight-fitting dresses.”

The email, aimed at two singers, read in part: “It has been brought to our attention that, although almost all of our vocalists are fit and slim, the way our boutique orchestras would like our front-line performing artists to be, two of our featured singers were not.”

Actor Jennifer Aniston tackled body shaming in the August edition of Vogue. Here’s how she described it:

“I think the problem is the tabloids and the gossip columns taking the human body and putting it in a category. They’re either fat-shaming, or body-shaming, or childless-shaming,” Aniston told Vogue.

“It’s a weird obsession that people have and I don’t understand exactly why they need to take people who are out there to entertain you, and rip them apart and bully them? Why are we teaching young women this? It’s incredibly damaging.”

Playboy model Danielle "Dani" Mathers leaves Los Angeles County Superior Court, this May after pleading no contest to charges she secretly snapped a photo of a naked 71-year-old woman in a locker room and posted it online with a mocking comment. She was sentenced to probation and community service. (Reed Saxon / The Associated Press file photo)

Body shaming often begins at a young age for girls and too often, stays with them into adulthood.

Sally Bergesen, founder and CEO of running sportswear company Oiselle, is a Twitter user who asked women to share their first experience of being body shamed via the hashtag #TheySaid. Her idea, featured in People, was to spur public discussion on the subject and hopefully change some bullying behaviours.

Bergesen kicked it off with a personal memory:

“Keep eating like that and you’re going to be a butterball.’ My dad when I was 12. Pls RT and share a body shaming comment. #TheySaid,” Bergesen tweeted.

Some responses, via Twitter:

“My own family member (when I was a tween): ‘you have horse hips!’ and that’s the demon that’s forever followed me.”

“ ‘I didn't break 100lbs until I was pregnant with my second child.’ My mom when I hit puberty and weighed in at 100lbs at 12.”

“ ‘You’d be a knock-out if you lost 15 pounds.’ Spoken to me by my “boyfriend” who was about 30 pounds overweight.”

The People article listed Bergesen’s suggested retorts to body shamers:

“What replies can we arm our girls with? I’ll start: ‘Actually, all bodies are different and I’m just right for me,’ ” she tweeted. Alternatively, Bergesen suggested, “ ‘Thanks for objectifying me, a-hole.’ ”

Dani Mathers was back in court recently and — speaking of shaming — failed to impress an L.A. judge with the pace of her graffiti scrubbing.

In November, Mathers was to submit evidence of the community service work she’s completed as part of her plea. According to published reports, Mathers informed the judge she’d finished just 56 hours of the 240 hours she was ordered to do.

She is scheduled to return to court Jan. 17 to prove she’d worked the entire 240 hours or will face the possibility of jail time — according to news reports, as much as 45 days.

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